Trivia

1001 Video Games

Birthday mode

On August 24, the game will turn "Birthday Mode" on. If enabled on the server you're connected to, this will replace all blood and gibs from dead players with festive and funny props, and the Critical Hit sound is replaced by a sound effect that has people cheering, playing horns and using champagne poppers. Additionally, players will wear a festive party hat on top of their heads, even if you're already wearing a hat. Certain maps will also load a beach ball that can be shot or meleed by both teams (until someone kicks it out of the map!)

A bug in the game caused Birthday Mode to be activated on August 20, 2010 - a full four days earlier than normal. This has since been addressed with a quick patch.

The original Team Fortress, which ran on the Quake engine, was released on August 24, 1996.

Development

The first announcement of the game was in 1999 as Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms. Back then the game was more serious both in graphics and in overall gameplay and was set in the modern world with two military units fighting each other and accomplishing objectives.

In 2000 Valve Corporation then announced that the game would be delayed because of the switch to the in-house developed 3D-Renderer Engine which is now know as the Source Engine.

Until July 13st, 2006 no more information about the game other than the claim that it was still in development would surface and what you can play now is what Valve showed on that day.

German version

In some German versions, the blood and gore effects were removed or replaced with more harmless things, e.g. when a player explodes hamburgers and screws fly around instead of body parts. A detailed list of changes can be found on schnittberichte.com (German).

References

A couple of things a Soldier will say in response to dominating a Sniper references the controversial censorship of the Australian version of Left 4 Dead 2. These lines were added in the Soldier vs. Demoman update.